I saw a cabbage butterfly (Pieris rapae) in the cranberry patch, wondered what it was doing there, and found that one of the plants has a couple of flowers. They usually bloom in June.

cranberry flowers

You don’t need a bog to grow cranberries, but it would make harvesting them easier. We have to pick ours by hand, which requires spending a lot of time bent over (the plants are quite short) or sitting or lying on the ground. It began to rain before we had picked the berries from even half the bushes, so we will have to finish another day. Today’s total was 2.21 kg (4.9 pounds) after they were sorted and washed. Our cranberry patch is eight by ten feet (2.4 by 3.0 m).

sorted and washed cranberries

Cranberries don’t ripen simultaneously, so some are still green. Picking cranberries is an arduous task, so we pick them all at once (and get it over with) rather than doing it in stages. This year, the rain has forced us to harvest on multiple days anyway.